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Using classification

Once visitors are classified into dimensions, the next step is to contextualize your content based on the classification. Uniform Context provides a flexible contextualization engine that enables automatic personalization and A/B testing as well as direct programmatic access to the classification data for advanced scenarios.

How Uniform Context performs personalization​

A personalized placement in Uniform Context is a list of variants that can be selected to be shown to the visitor. Each variant can have criteria that allow it to be evaluated against the visitor's classification to determine if it is shown. A variant that has no criteria is a default variant that is shown to anyone if no more specific variant is matched.

To select a personalized variant, Context starts at the beginning of the placement's variant list. Each variant's criteria is evaluated, and the first matching variant is selected. This means that it is important to order your variants so that the most specific variants are first, and the least specific (default) variants are last.

How Personalized Variants are selected​

Let's look at an example. We have the following personalized placement:

  • Variant 1: Visitor score in the 'Consumer' audience is greater than 0
  • Variant 2: Visitor score in the 'Marketers' audience is less than 50
  • Variant 3: No criteria

In this scenario, a visitor who had...

  • No scores at all: Variant 3 is shown because none of the earlier variants match the visitor, and Variant 3 is a default variant
  • A score in the 'Consumer' audience of 50: Variant 1 because its criteria matched
  • A score in the 'Marketers' audience of 25: Variant 2 because its criteria of less than 50 matched
  • A score in the 'Marketers' audience of 51: Variant 3 because the marketer score is greater than variant 2's requirement
  • A score in both 'Consumer' and 'Marketers' audiences of 25: Variant 1 because it matched before Variant 2 (unless we were taking two or more variants for this placement)
  • A score in the 'Developers' audience of 5000: Variant 3 because there is no matching variant for this audience so the default is selected

Creating effective criteria​

Uniform Context allows you to create multiple placement criteria for a personalized variant, such as "The Consumer audience has the strongest score OR the Consumer audience score is greater than 450." This gives flexibility to handle advanced personalization scenarios, but do keep in mind that it is more maintainable to keep as much of your logic as possible in the classification taxonomy instead of in the placement.

Measuring effectiveness​

Any effective personalization strategy must be measured to make sure it is having a positive effect. To enable this, Uniform Context enables you to connect its personalization results to any analytics tool available. Each personalized placement has a name which is sent to any connected analytics along with the variant that was selected. The resulting data can then be analyzed and reported on in any way the analytics tool allows.

Context ships with a connector for Google Analytics v4 (gtag), and a generic event-handling interface that adapts to any tool with minimal code.

Control group​

In addition to tracking the effect of personalized variations, it is important to track the effect of personalization vs no personalization to ensure your strategy is working. Uniform Context supports setting a control group which is a percentage of your users that is not exposed to any personalized variant regardless of their classification. Whether the visitor is part of the control group is sent to analytics for analysis. Control group members will not be shown personalization, A/B testing, or have any classification data.

The default settings do not enable a control group to avoid confusion during evaluation and testing. For production a value of 15% is recommended.